For all the attention to deepening security ties between Europe and the Indo-Pacific, the better focus belongs on economic cooperation.
That’s the relationship with the greatest potential impact. With the world’s biggest economies actively working to undermine the international economic order, it’s essential that Brussels and European Union member governments work as closely as they can with like-minded Indo-Pacific partners to check that behavior.
Japan gets it. For over a decade, it has forged closer ties with the EU. Four years of negotiations yielded an economic partnership agreement in 2019 that former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a moving force behind the deal, called “the world’s largest, free, industrialized economic zone.” The Japan-EU Economic Partnership Agreement accounts for 30% of global wealth and 40% of world trade.
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